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Cory Doctorow on Writing Silicon Valley’s Greatest Forensic Accountant

Cory Doctorow on Writing Silicon Valley’s Greatest Forensic Accountant

Red Team Blues by Cory DoctorowAnyone on the Internet (hi! if ur reading this now, ur here) knows that this place is scary. The wild digital west—where some of humanity’s most lucrative heists, among all manner of other shady business, are executed at the tap of a clicky keyboard. It’s a tried, true tactic in the fraudster’s playbook to leverage lack of knowledge of the virtual landscape to turn the fun place where we read blog posts about books into dangerous financial snares. To that end, Cory Doctorow, who knows a lot about tech things, has dedicated his writing career to bridging that knowledge gap with his readers by way of page-turnin’ techno-thrillers.

We have him here today to chat about his upcoming novel, Red Team Blues.

Enjoy : )


I am literally a-tremble with excitement at the thought of people reading Red Team Blues because it writing it was amazing. I write when I’m anxious. During the lockdown, I wrote and wrote and wrote. Red Team Blues battered its way out of my fingertips in five weeks flat, *blam*, there on the page, the hard-boiled adventures of Marty Hench, Silicon Valley’s greatest forensic accountant, who has seen every tech industry money-scam in his 40 year career.

Marty was so much fun to write, because he was a perfect counter to the “shield of boringness,” scam economy’s way of making fraud plausible to devour your savings. Finance bros call it MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”) – a financial arrangement that is so dull, no one can read the fine-print without slipping into a coma.

For 20 years, my artistic and professional vocation has been figuring out how to make people understand complicated, dangerous things before those things destroy them. Those complicated, dangerous things are often embodied in spreadsheets, but while everyone else who discovered spreadsheets immediately started figuring out how to hide money with them, Marty decided he’d use spreadsheets to find dirty money.

The usual hard-boiled detective is a reactionary, yearning for the days when men were men and everyone else knew their place. Marty’s also melancholy for the past—but he pines for a time when making things and doing things was more important than manipulating balance sheets. It’s a feeling a lot of us share.

Sometimes, you can’t tell if anyone’s going to like the book you’re writing. Sometimes, you’re not even sure if you like it (see above, re: anxiety). But sometimes, you just know. I just knew when I was writing Little Brother and I just knew when I was writing Red Team Blues. If there was any doubt, it was incinerated when I woke up at 2 a.m. to find the bedside light on and my wife sitting up reading.

“Why are you awake?” I groaned.

“I had to find out how it ended,” she said.

Honestly, what writer could be mad about that?

I hope you’ll give it a shot.

Cory

Pre-order Red Team Blues Here:

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